Biography - Kelvin Smythe - Click here.

Biography – Kelvin Smythe

Kelvin Smythe was a New Zealand primary school teacher, principal, university lecturer, and senior inspector of schools.

He has written various publications and articles on social studies promoting the idea of the ‘feeling for’ approach to social studies. This approach has the affective at its centre – an affective built on knowledge gained from intense observation. Its main aim is developing a respect for cultural difference by leading children to recognise the underlying similarity in all human behaviour (we may eat different foods, but we all eat food; we may have different family structures, but we all have families; we may have different rules, but we all have rules). Children are led to this recognition, not by an emphasis on abstract discussion, but on the gaining of knowledge from observing people’s lives. The approach is as successful with studying events around the signing of the Treaty, as it is with studying life in a Cambodian village.

Kelvin Smythe has been on various social studies national curriculum committees since 1970. In 1982, under the auspices of the Learning in Science Project (University of Waikato), he gained a fellowship to investigate the social studies concepts of children. This experience reaffirmed his view that coming to terms with cultural difference is a major developmental task – one worthy to be the main aim of social studies, and an aim of school education as a whole.

Another education preoccupation has been developmental teaching, which has long been an ideal for New Zealand classrooms, especially junior classrooms. His writing and courses had as their purpose a clarifying of the concept to encourage teachers of older children to also run more child-centred programmes.

In 1989, when New Zealand schools were restructured under a New Right Philosophy, Kelvin Smythe left the formal education system to be a critic of some of the restructuring outcomes, and to stand with classroom teachers, many of whom felt threatened and unrepresented. His main voice for doing this was Developmental Network Magazine. In its heyday, Network Magazine, published three times a year, was purchased by nearly every primary school. It provided ideological support and classroom guidance for teachers, and some notoriety and legal consequences for its publisher. (When publication of the magazine stopped in 1999, a compendium of the best of Network was published. To mark the re-establishment of the networkonnet website, this publication, for a limited period, is free on request.)

During this time there was a rapid increase in the publication of social studies resources. These were mainly packs of A3 pictures accompanied by notes and a teaching unit. Another social studies publication was the Social Studies File, a yearly production of social studies units. (These have been restructured into a series of folders.)

Kelvin Smythe also participated in a publishing project as a principal writer for an international science series. As well, he continued taking courses in New Zealand, and some in Europe and the USA.

In 1999, Kelvin Smythe decided to stop publication of Network, and to reduce his involvement in education. Some of the worst excesses of the New Right education ideology had been avoided, most teachers had come to terms with the new structures (in a reassuringly undermining sort of way), he had contributed his two cents worth and did not want to become repetitive, nor did he want to keep reinforcing the view he was a stirrer (this was often kindly, even admiringly, meant, but he felt misrepresented his motivation), and, finally, the new Labour government was likely to contribute to a more positive education setting.

In the intervening period he has kept an eye on education, his horses, and his grandchildren (not necessarily in that order), and did some classroom teaching.

Kelvin Smythe has returned to writing on education for a number of reasons. He continues to be frustrated by the paucity of attention given by teacher groups to the ideological underpinnings of education issues. He would like to see schools become less bureaucratic, so that teaching could become more joyous, and attract and retain more adventurous people. The metaphor he has in mind is more knight errant (if the chauvinist image can be excused) and less Round Table. When, from time-to-time, he says schools have developed an unattractive prissiness, he is really hinting at why he thinks schools will fail to attract or retain male teachers. Foucault’s nightmare vision of the surveillance society, he believes, should be a major topic at professional meetings. As well, it is his view that schools are allowing their clarity of education vision to be confused by the electronic tools available. He is concerned about an apparent shallowness in learning programmes. Process, he believes, is being emphasized at the expense of knowledge.

He is not impressed with a lot of the slickness surrounding school marketing (aren’t markets where things are bought and sold?); the way some schools allow themselves  to be used as poster schools to promote a narrow, conformist view of education; the large number of out-of-school meetings for principals (more time should be spent standing with their teachers and less sitting with other principals); the review office (still), yes they are kinder and gentler, their wings having been clipped, but there is a better way; claims of new knowledge – it is that confusion with process again; university jargon – an academic rite of passage, but also useful for obscuring the downright ordinariness of the actual message in much academic writing; talk of enquiry learning  - it is a label now so widely used  as to be meaningless; question taxonomies – good questioning does not come in pre-packaged sequences; prolix ministry publications – stop doing international surveys, try being original; the abundance of overseas gurus with ideas, which seem to him, based on pop psychology; and, finally, anyone claiming to prepare children for the 21^st century (the best way to do the right thing for children’s future, he believes, is to meet their needs now).

These ideas are likely to be the rubric for networkonnet. On the other hand, he may have a change of mind, and concentrate on his horses, his grandchildren, or write a book or something … In the likely event, however, that networkonnet will continue, your contributions and comments will be warmly welcomed. And unless a particular posting is otherwise designated, you are invited, indeed encouraged, to download, or cut and paste items, for any purpose that suits.